


All Our Systems Dreaming

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, M/M, Robots, are we human or are we dancer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 21:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14723792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: In a broken city, there is a broken man that fixes broken bots.





	All Our Systems Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> This is for my generous auction winner Elena, who asked for a Robot AU, and for whom I hope I delivered. 
> 
> Generously beta'd and cheerleaded by the sublime Awwnutbunnies.

They brought Bucky the hard cases. The impossible ones. Maids whose mistresses had torn them to shreds, their springs a sad trickle out of their uncovered abdomens. Pleasure models whose masters have a sadistic taste. 

And soldiers come home from war and then discarded into trash heaps. 

They don’t give them to Bucky out of kindness. There was a rough practicality on the lane. Reduce, reuse, recycle. They knew that Bucky had the kind of cold clear judgement that meant they’d either get a neat box of salvaged parts, money up front, or a functioning bot to resell within a week. All for reasonable rates and a minimum of talk. 

The cycle of a dead bot’s life was as crystal clear as the way a corpse would be broken down in the woods. Scavenged by the residents of the lane, rendered down into neatly cleaned cogs and chips by Bucky, and then settled into the Dealer’s hands with pockets richer and the remains a distant memory of decay. 

His shop was very small in the front. Just big enough to receive a customer and their salvage. The woman that brought in the soldier had one eye swollen shut, a mark of the fight she’d had to claim the bulky thing in her arms. 

“Upfront or out back?” He asked, his voice a dull gravel in the dense air. The front end of his shop was lit with a single gas lantern that sizzled and flickered. It matched the rest of the street, messy with humanity and smoked out from poor ventilation. 

He expected this bruised up woman to go for out back. Almost everyone with an entire intact bot did. They’d trust Bucky to make his decisions with a few coins before, then a few after, and in exchange the Dealer would pay them richly for what Bucky had wrought. 

“Upfront,” her eyes were wide. “I can’t wait.” 

“You steal it?” He demanded. 

“No!” 

“I don’t care if you did, just gotta take precautions,” he was already more interested, looking over the bulky bot. Soldier, definitely. 

“I didn’t,” she repeated. “I found him fair and square. But I’m going to use the money to get out of this city. Somewhere I can breathe and I have to do that before-” 

Someone. Before someone she was scared of stopped her. Bucky held up her hand. 

“Less I know the better. Let me see him.” 

She handed her find over to him. She must’ve known some of his reputation because she was careful not to touch Bucky in the exchange.

“He’s non-functional. He had this,” she tapped a star etched on the surface like a company brand, but it was no brand Bucky had seen before. “I think he’s custom, not a regular unit.” 

“Looks it,” he agreed neutrally. He reached for the lantern and turned a knob bringing only a little more light into the room. With a tap to his temple, his lenses came over his eyes. 

“You’re a mod?” 

He didn’t answer her since he figured she wasn’t really asking. The soldier was well crafted. Lovingly made even. Someone had worked with varying shades of metal to create features where usually there was a blank mask. The lenses focused in and Bucky frowned. Very custom. There were articulations for eye blinking, eyebrow moving, even lips that could smile or frown. When it had been animated, it would’ve given every impression of thinking and feeling. 

It was revolting. Who would make such a thing for the express purpose of fighting and being torn apart? 

The body was solidly built and there was less detail, more practical armor shielding in the arms and torso. The paint job had been bright once, but was now badly scratched and a little dented. The hands again were bizarrely detailed. Soldier bots should have broad blunt instruments just articulate enough to hold a gun. Hell, some of them just had gun hands when they were a rush job. 

This damn thing was so detailed that its hands were more lifelike than Bucky’s real hand. They blew his fake one out of the water. The waist was tapered in, impractical again there. The soldier bots were built like tanks. This one was built like an athlete. Like a human soldier might’ve been before ‘civility’ had replaced the need for flesh in fighting. 

There was no obvious damage. He had to lean nearly nose to metal for the lenses and his own good sense to give the answer. 

“Any frost where you found him?” 

The woman jumped and Bucky wondered how long he’d been looking. 

“Fished him out of the river. Thought he was a corpse at first, drifting in this block of ice. I had to chip him out,” she nodded. “Whole river is full of chunks like that. Cold as a rich man’s heart out there.” 

 

“Yeah,” he stood back up and opened his cash drawer, “he’s a recycle job. I can fix him, but a model this custom, someone will come looking for him and that’s bad business for me. His parts are top rate though. I can give you five hundred for him.” 

He wasn’t anticipating the arms thrown around him in a grateful hug and he had to repress the instinct to throw her through a wall. It was a very very close thing. He pressed a stack of wrinkled bills into her shaking hands. 

“Thank you,” she nearly sobbed and ran from the shop. 

Five hundred would get a person far out of the city. Might even get them set up when they got there. Five hundred wasn’t much to him in the long run. His needs were simple and few. He hoped she got out alive. 

Bucky locked up and doused the lantern. He was closed for the day. The soldier bot was heavy and awkward. It took Bucky a few tries to find the right grip to drag him into the workshop. 

No gas lanterns back there. He’d rigged an ancient generator up to work with cooking oil, something he wasn’t eager for anyone else on the street to know. The fried food smell just got blamed on the questionable food carts that rolled up and down the lane. Generators were precious and anyone who knew how to make them run without gasoline would be in demand. 

Bucky didn’t want to be in demand. He wanted to be left the hell alone. 

His workshop was big, taking up four-fifths of the downstairs of his building. His building by squatting rights, of course. No one owned anything in this neighborhood with actual legal paperwork, but none of the original legal owners were coming back either. 

Survival of the fittest and Bucky was bioengineered to be very fit. 

The workshop was filled with parts he’d taken as his cut when there’d been no money to offer. Little bits and bobs that could be reused later. Then there were his own scavenged parts, taken from places no one else could get to. Each had its own place in a marked bin. Nothing cluttered the tables. Every Saturday he sprayed down the surfaces with a homemade cleaner that left everything sweet smelling. He couldn’t abide by mess here. Not at the heart of his fresh life. 

Next to the generator was a pot-bellied stove with its coals still glowing warm. He stirred them and roused up a flame. The winter was brutally beating against the walls, seeping in under doorways. More than cold enough to freeze a bot and if water was introduced, the ice would do some terrible things to delicate gear work. 

Bucky set the bot in a chair close to the stove. 

“Thaw out,” he ordered it and then went to his bench to finish disassembling his last job. Hodge would be by in two days for the parts. It was market day tomorrow, so better to finish tonight. 

He listened to the water drip out of the soldier as the ice melted inside of it. After an hour of that, he pulled out one of his oil-stained towels and put it underneath him. The thing must’ve been tossed in a river at some point with all that was coming out if it. 

When the other job was done, Bucky made himself beans, slicing in a hard sausage. He didn’t have another chair, so he ate standing at his workbench. 

He boiled water from the backyard pump and drank it before it fully cooled, then used the rest to wash his face, then his dinner bowl. 

When there was nothing left to do, he pulled out the leather-bound book with its heavy pen. He flipped to the middle on his current page. 

_Janu 15. Day 684._

He paused, savoring the amount as he did every day. So many days between him and what had been before. 

_Operating at 85%. Compromised by extreme weather (v. cold) and seasonal lethargy. Money: -500, +25. Current balance:_

He checked the last entry to be sure, even though he had never forgotten a number. 

_8,451. To do: Purchase quilt (see v.cold). Report to MC wrt current compromised state. (Must do. Day 7 of delay, unacceptable). Disassemble new acquisition._

He paused again, looking at the well-crafted head. Someone had taken the time to give it hair. Long platinum strands that would never be out of place. He drew a careful line through the last sentence and went on. 

_Revive new acquisition. Accumulate data, then decide course of action. End day 684._

He put the book away. The bot would probably keep on thawing through the night and it was next to impossible that it would wake up. 

Bucky flexed his metal hand. Sometimes impossible things happened and he hated being caught unaware. He found the onion paper he used to write receipts (his journal was too expensive to go tearing pages out willy-nilly) and wrote in clear capitals: 

_Hello. I am Bucky, your temporary caretaker._ Not master because...just because. _I am asleep upstairs. Please wait for me to wake up to tend to you. You require repairs and should not move. Thank you._

The bot was mostly immobile, but Bucky was able set one stiff hand on it’s lap and set the note in it. A bot this nice could almost certainly read. If it couldn’t, the presence of a note would probably be enough to keep it from wandering off in search of its actual master. 

Bucky pat it awkwardly on the head, the thin platinum wires surprisingly soft under his hand. Then he headed upstairs. 

The second floor had a lean to it where it had settled against the neighboring house. It gave the windows a sort of abstract view of the smoggy lane, chimneys puffing out whatever foul smoke their furnaces could chew through. Fuel for fires was whatever absolutely couldn’t be used for anything else. At least on the lane, everyone had a use for rubber. From his window, Bucky could make out plumes from those less resourceful streets, black and cruel as they blotted out the stars. 

Downstairs was where Bucky lived, but he preferred to sleep up here. There was an old bed, left behind, with a mattress that cradled him in it’s sagging middle. There was a pile of quilts and he burrowed under, warming himself with the idea of adding to it. 

He fell asleep listening to the night walkers hawking all their various wares and the first of their customers stumbling after. 

There was evening, there was morning and in between Bucky was nothing. He woke with the dawn. The first streaky bits of light cut weakly through the window. It took time for him to come all the way to the surface. He knew the floor would be cold, but he had on socks. Good socks, he reminded himself firmly, no staying in bed all day because your toes might be cold. 

The floor creaked under his weight as if vocalizing his own uncertainty. 

He used the bathroom, toilet rigged to the old sewer line without a prayer that it didn’t get into the drinking water in the end. Bucky had lived in a lab, in a tube where the great minds of another nation decanted his sense of self from his flesh with careful touches of glistening buttons. There were creations in the world made of pure will and science so advanced that it seemed like magic. 

But in places like his city, his broken ugly city, even plumbing had fallen to the wayside. 

Still, he came here and didn’t leave. Not just to hide (though the hiding was good here, little Bucky rat hidden among the thousands of mice), but because he could practically hear the throbbing heart of all those other mice that said ‘survive, survive, survive’. 

He flushed and went down the stairs into his workshop. 

The bot wasn’t in its chair. It wasn’t in the workshop. Bucky tensed and checked the back door. Still locked. No signs of forced entry. He moved more carefully into the shop front. Sitting at the desk was the bot. It was just sitting as it had in the other chair. The front door was open, just a crack. The lock was still fine though. Had someone picked it and...what? Not stolen the bot, but moved it? Why bother? 

Bucky crossed slowly to the door and pushed it shut, relocking it. He turned to face the bot. 

Its eyes were open. One hand lay flat on the little desk Bucky used to keep something between himself and his customers. The note that he’d left was crumpled beneath its palm. Its chest was moving. Just fractionally. The breastplate moved up and down. Bucky could hear the soft sucking sound of its hydraulics, so near and yet so far from lungs drawing breath. 

“What year is it?” The bot’s finely made lips moved. It had a voice. 

“Why would someone do that?” Bucky frowned at it. Why would someone invent something so intricate as a voicebox for battle fodder? 

“What year is it?” And the bot sounded more insistent. It was the voice of something like a pleasure bot. Meant to imitate emotion. 

“Don’t know the number rightly,” he said so the thing wouldn’t get stuck in a loop. 

“How long since the war started?” 

“Eighty years? Ninety? What’s your designation?” 

“No.” 

Bucky froze. 

“No?” 

“That’s not possible. It can’t be that long.” 

“Designation,” Bucky said again more firmly. 

“Everything looked different out there,” the voice was smaller now. Lost. “I don’t know where I am.” 

“Designation?” He asked one last time helplessly. The bot’s wide eyes blinked once, a tiny click-whir of a gesture. “You’re not supposed to be able to refuse to give a designation. It’s basic design of vocal bots. Hell, even non-vocals have to point to their serial. Were you hacked?” 

“I don’t have a ‘designation’,” the bot’s broad shoulders slumped. Advanced body language mimicry. Why? 

“Who made you?” He asked, with no bit of awe. 

“They’re probably all dead now,” the bot’s hand clenched around Bucky’s note. “Where am I?” 

“You’re in deep nowhere,” Bucky told the thing that did not seem like a thing at all. “The place that used to be Brooklyn. This is a bot chop shop.” 

“And you’re the chopper?” It blinked again. Click-whir. 

“Something like that.” 

“I won’t let you disassemble me.” 

“Let?” Bucky stared at it. “I need to know who made you.” 

“Tell me who made you first,” its strong chiseled chin jutted out. 

“Why-” he stopped himself before he started. This was confusing and exhausting and he hadn’t even had breakfast yet. “I’m going to eat. I’m going to buy a quilt. I’m going to go talk to MC. Revive new acquisition is already done. Gather data. You’ll come with me. I will figure out how to do the right thing for you.” 

The bot’s eyes click-whirred, “People used to call me Captain. It’s not a designation.” 

“Is it a name?” Bucky asked quietly and wasn’t surprised when the bot shook its head. “Do you have one of those?” 

“I used to,” it’s hydraulics lifted and let out a whistling sigh. 

“Slippery things,” Bucky said grimly. “A name will get away from you if you let it.” 

The bot didn’t say anything to that, but it did follow Bucky back into the workshop and sit quietly while he had his morning oatmeal, a vitamin C tab sprinkled into it. The bowl got washed and put back in its spot, then he turned to the bot, 

“Are you working at maximum efficiency?” 

“Everything works fine,” another wheeze, something like a sigh. “Let’s go get your quilt.” 

Bucky led the bot out into the street. The roads were quiet. The lane was a night street. This time of day, everyone was sleeping off their earlier choices. He headed down to the end where the lane gave out to the main drag. 

He took a breath to steady himself. Leaving the lane was always precarious. But it was important. MC said it was. 

“This way,” he muttered and stepped onto the broken pavement. 

Children played a few feet away, a chanting game with a bouncing ball. It rolled away and Captain bent over and bounced it back. Bucky sucked in a breath, but the kids just watched for a moment then went back to what they were doing. 

“What?” the bot kept pace with him even though Bucky was a brisk walker. Most bots were slower. 

“Watch the others,” he pointed a finger to a maidbot, emptying slop buckets into the gutter. She moved jerkily, apparently unaware of anyone around her. “Pretend. Don’t want someone trying to jack you from me cause you act different. Different can mean cash.” 

“I can defend myself,” the bot said quietly, but it had stopped to watch the maidbot. After finishing with the buckets, it took it’s hurky-jerky steps up into the building. It negotiated opening and closing the door with the buckets pretty well for a basic build. It still took it over a minute. “What’s wrong with it?” 

“Nothing,” Bucky watched Captain watch the bot. “That’s just how they are.” 

“That model?” 

“Most bots I’ve ever seen. Some of the best ones have voices like you, but they respond slower,” he frowned. “Thought maybe you were a rich guy’s thing.” 

“I am not a thing,” Captain said firmly. Angrily. 

“Neither am I,” Bucky frowned. He wasn’t, he reminded himself. Not a thing. MC said so. “So. Two not-things.” 

They walked together in silence after that. The street slowly filled with people both buyers and sellers alike. Smells collided together: motor oil and frying bread, ceremonial incense from a group of violet dyed monks, and fish already turning in the bleak streaky sunlight. 

Stalls went up haphazardly, overlapping awnings and well worn bickering flying across the pavement. Bucky headed down and a little to the left where two young men were already pinning up bright intricate quilts instead of tenting to advertise their wares. They signed their hellos as Bucky approached and he signed back. 

Captain reached out, but didn’t touch one red splashed affair, a pinwheel number that contrasted with the gleam of his copper skin. 

Bucky handed over a small pile of coins for it. They took their fair price and bundled it in worn ribbon for him. 

“You didn’t have to get that one.”

“Don’t have any with red in it yet,” he shrugged. 

“How many do you need with just one bed?” 

“Got nine. Cold at night.” 

Captain’s feet clicked against the pavement. Bucky went silently, not that anyone could tell in the crush that was starting. Sometimes, he imagined that his feet didn’t touch the ground at all. That he had become less of a person, but more of a cold wind. 

He was not a thing, but sometimes he wasn’t not a thing either. 

The crowd didn’t end. His head swam. The smells mixed together in a slosh and he clutched the quilt a little closer. His feet stopped listening to sense and moved them out of the crowd and down into a little alleyway. There were a few cats milling around a puddle. He watched them blankly, his back hitting a slimy wall. 

He was distantly aware of a voice. 

It was singing. Not well and very quietly. The words were a slurry mumble, but the melody almost familiar. 

“I know that song,” he came up out of the dense fog to say. 

“So do I,” Captain’s bronze lips moved into a smile. This close again and Bucky could tell what made the eyes different. 

“Sapphires,” they were so small, dotted through metal, almost invisible until they caught the light and sparkled. Gave life to cold metal. “Someone made you well.” 

“Yes,” Captain’s smile twitched. His eyes click-whirred in a blink. A blink of jeweled eyes. “You could say that. Where are we going?” 

To MC was where they should be going, but the panic was tiring. He didn’t want to walk further into the crush. 

“Back,” he determined. “Back home.” 

Captain walked beside him the whole way. He asked no questions, offered no solutions. He waited patiently as Bucky bought a bag of beans and a bag of rice from a quiet vendor set off from the main street. He said nothing as Bucky twisted closed lock after lock on his door until he could inhale deeply again. 

“Do you need anything?” he asked when words came back online. 

“No,” Captain avoided the chair that Bucky had sat him in the night before. Instead he leaned over the table, chin in hand. Casual. Human. “I’m primarily solar powered.” 

“Hard to get sun through the fog,” he warned. 

“I can process a lot of raw materials into fuel if I have to,” Captain shrugged. “As long as there is a lot of whatever it is. But dim sunlight will still work.” 

“What about...sleep?” He asked, uncertain. Bots didn’t sleep as a rule, but they weren’t conscious as rule either. 

“Two to three hours in a standby in a twenty-four period is enough.” 

Bucky fiddled with a loose screw on his work bench. 

“I sleep upstairs,” he said cautiously. “There’s not much up there. Don’t have a second bed, but if you don’t want to be alone...” 

“Thank you. I’d like that.” 

There was still a lot of daylight left. Bucky would normally just sit and stare into space until his brain was fully recovered from the morning, but with Captain’s glittering eyes on him he felt compelled to move. 

“Inventory day,” he decided and took down his clipboard with the rows of parts and their number next to them. 

Captain didn’t seem to mind pouring over small boxes of tiny parts or crawling on the floor to reach the bulkier items. He even re-arranged them a little, jigsawing them together into neater stacks. 

There was a knock on the shop door around sundown. Bucky motioned Captain to stay and passed through. He undid his locks and opened to Frankie, a regular scrapper. 

“Up front,” he held up a sack that oozed fluid. “Just bits and pieces from the dump.” 

Bucky opened the bag, accessing and handed Frankie forty. The man grinned and ran off. The locks went right back on and Bucky carried the bag into the back. 

“So this is you chopping,” Captain watched as Bucky lifted components from the bag. 

“I fix it or break it down,” he shrugged. “It’s a living. Does it...does it bother you?” 

Captain reached out, picked up what must’ve been the remains of a bot’s hand. The fingers hung limply from his grasp, the wiring trailing off around his wrist like morbid jewelry. 

“Does it bother you?” 

Bucky’s shoulder twitched. 

“Sometimes.” 

Captain nodded and set the hand down gently. When Bucky sucked in a breath and picked up a screwdriver, Captain pulled over a stool and found a matching one. Together they broke down the components until they didn’t look human at all. 

Bucky ate rice and beans for dinner. Captain oiled a rag and ran it over his joints until they gleamed. He looked more like art than a bot. 

When Bucky took out his journal, Captain politely started working on his feet, eyes averted. Privacy. Right. That was polite. People gave each other those pockets of space. 

_Janu 16. Day 685._ So many stacked up, so many days between himself and itself. 

_Operating at 82%. Cold continues. Money: -100. Current balance: 8,351_

It’d be plus tomorrow with parts to sell. The Dealer would run through tomorrow. 

_To do: Report to MC wrt current compromised state. (Must do. Day 8 of delay, v. bad). Meet Dealer._

The Dealer would be interested in Captain, might be best to keep him back. 

_Find work for Captain. End day 685._

When Bucky put the journal back, Captain looked up. Bucky gave him a tight smile, it felt crooked. 

“Bed time.” 

He took the stairs carefully, unwilling to turn on the lights. Captain’s tread was light. The new comforter stacked nicely on top of the others. Bucky got into bed. Captain went to the window with a soft wheeze. He sat on the sill. 

Bucky studied the faded light in the gleaming strands of false hair. The sapphire eyes were heavy lidded, a mockery of fatigue. 

“Good night, Captain,” he whispered. The bot blinked, click-whirr, turning to face him. 

“Sweet dreams, Buck.” 

The words landed thud-thud-THUD into him. 

Bucky’s memory before MC were thin, fragile things. He had to remember around them or pretend not to really be thinking of them at all or they crumbled away to dust. 

Buck. Dreams. 

He hadn’t told the Captain his name, had he? 

He closed his eyes against the pretty picture of Captain glittering in the moonlight. There had been a voice as familiar as his own once. It twined through his days and colored his nights. It defined him, bolstered him, but it had been gone a long long time.

There was evening and there was morning. Bucky didn’t dream, sweet or otherwise. 

In the morning, Captain was still there. He greeted Bucky with a twitch of a smile, and descended the stairs so Bucky could wash his face and piss in private. 

He ate his oatmeal while Captain finished sorting out the parts from last night. 

“Now what?” 

“We take them out to the Dealer,” Bucky frowned. He was supposed to come up with a job so Captain wouldn’t be inflicted with the man. “He’s a curious person. He might want you.” 

“He can’t have me,” Captain shrugged. 

There wasn’t a lot more work to be done anyway. 

And it was sort of nice to have someone walk out with him. 

The Dealer came by once a week, parking his obnoxiously shiny mech with it’s tank treads and red glossy paint at the top of the lane. He was already there, talking with a one of the scrappers that haunted the landfill. They were dickering over price and then the Dealer snorted and counted coin into his hand. 

The Dealer was a trim person with small glasses that saw much what Bucky’s lenses did and clothes that were too clean for the lane. He made no attempt to blend in. When he saw Bucky coming, he straightened up. 

“The Modded Mystery Man,” the Dealer threw out his arms as if to embrace him though they never got close enough to do more than exchange money. “What have you brought- oh hellooooooooo.” 

“Hello,” Captain stopped, a little behind Bucky for all his earlier confidence. 

“Who’s this?” the Dealer came closer, and Bucky tensed. 

“He’s with me.” 

“I can see that,” he reached out, but for the bag Bucky held instead of Captain. “Let’s see what you have.” 

The Dealer’s seemingly dismissed attention only worried Bucky more. He handed over the bag, barely listening to the appraisal. He didn’t dicker or barter. The Dealer knew that and simply offered a fair price. When Bucky got close enough to take the money, the Dealer leaned in. 

“I know that machine,” he said low. “And you can’t keep him here. It’s dangerous. To him and you.”

“Are you threatening me?” Bucky growled. 

“No, you numb nut, I’m warning you,” the Dealer huffed a sigh. His breath smelled wrong. Not bad, but tainted somehow. Like ozone. “Maybe you’ve gotten cocky because no one around here cares that you’re augmented, but he’s something else. People have been looking for him for a long time. My own ....it doesn’t matter. If they find him, it won’t end well for him.” 

“Why do you care?” Bucky frowned. “Do you want to take him away?” 

“No,” he breathed out again, that puff of wrong electric breath. “I’m not even offering you a place to go. Might’ve been able to once, but not anymore. I’ve got kids to protect.” 

It had never occured to Bucky that the Dealer might have a family. There was a photo wedged in by the steering wheel of the mech though. He’d never looked at it before. He craned his neck, made out the silhouette of a tall thin woman, a child tucked in close to her legs. 

“I have people to watch out for,” the Dealer went on. “One of them is you.” 

“You don’t even know my name,” Bucky frowned. 

The Dealer smirked. 

“I know who you are. Probably better than you do yourself,” he tilted his head and looked at Captain. “Get him out of here. Get yourself out of here too while you’re at it. Maybe Herself is helping you, but her time is almost over. I can only spread myself so thin.”

“I don’t- you haven’t-” 

“Who do you think makes sure that agents never reach the lane? Magic?” 

Bucky’s natural hand started to shake. “They don’t come here.” 

“They haven’t. But one day they will.” 

Bucky didn’t remember walking away or running or shutting the door and doing up all the locks. Or going back to bed. But he woke up at noon, groggy and sick to his stomach. 

Captain was kneeling by his bed. He had a bowl of rice in his hand. 

“You should eat.” 

Bucky hadn’t eaten in bed before. A clear oversight. Nice to eat with the quilts tucked up to his chin. 

“I talked to your friend some more,” Captain pillowed his chin on his hands. He looked peaceful. Natural. Real. “He’s a real jerk.” 

“Not my friend,” Bucky said around a mouthful of rice. 

“Okay, but he’s an ally. He said he couldn’t tell me much, but that you didn’t always live here.” 

“I did,” Bucky chewed carefully, then swallowed. “Once. And then I didn’t.” 

“When?” 

“Before.” 

Captain nodded as if that made sense and went quiet. 

“Where did you come from?” Bucky asked after another bite. 

“Here,” Captain sighed, a hiss of pneumatics. “But it looked different then.” 

“You said it had been since before the war,,” Bucky recalled, the information jig-sawing back into place. He had forgotten in the rush and the panic. “I didn’t know there were bots that long ago. Never knew there were bots like you.” 

“There aren’t,” Captain gave him a twitch of a smile. “I’m the only one.” 

“Broke the mold?” 

“Something like that.” 

They looked at each other over the quiet expanse of the bed and Bucky felt the silence tightening around them. Usually he liked the quiet, but now it bore down with all the things he hadn’t ever had to say. 

“I don’t remember who I was,” he finally pushed out. “I was a prisoner of war. They modded me.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

“Me too.” 

Captain reached out, touched Bucky’s prothstetic. Their hands made a soft ‘ting’ as they touched. 

There were stories under their stories, but neither of them said anything else. Bucky found a deck of cards squirreled under the bed with a few of his other treasures. Neither of them knew any games, so they made up their own. 

“I need to go see MC tomorrow,” Bucky said when the last card was dropped and the game ended with the sun extinguished below the skyline. “First thing.” 

“All right,” Captain gathered the cards in a precise stack. “First thing.” 

First thing in the morning, Bucky ate breakfast. Then he ran his water purifier through a filtration sequence and cleaned all the parts. He ate lunch once he’d put it back together. All the while, Captain hung like a shadow behind him, not saying a word. It was only when the silence grew too thick that Bucky reluctantly began to close up shop. 

The streets were busy with foot traffic even without the market in full swing. Some merchants were out anyway, hawking their wares with dogged persistence to an unfeeling mass. It was washing day for many houses and the streets ran with murky bubbling water that issued forth from a hundred open doorways. 

Bucky ignored them all, marching forward with his eyes on the skyline. There was a roof that boasted an iron hawk, it’s gaze drifting to the left and it’s wings frozen perpetually in take off. A symbol that called to agents across the world, calling them home and then dispersing them again. These days the house was often quiet, bereft of it’s army with only one shadow to sweep across it’s floors and maintain a haphazard vigilance. 

The door to the house was unadorned of bell or knocker, but as soon as Bucky stood before it, it slid open. 

A young woman with hair the color of drying blood answered. 

“Hello. She’s expecting you.” 

Bucky waited for her to step away, to slip back down the hall. He knew her, in the way he knew some things. Sideways slippery memory of something that ran quicksilver through his fingers. He knew she had been here sometimes after he’d come back. She never seemed comfortable being in the same room as him, so he’d always let her go. 

He took the stairs upwards, the mix of anticipation and fear muddled in him. 

Four flights of stairs that opened in a wide and airy room. Glass doors led out onto a balcony flanked by tall metal spikes. MC sat in a chair, a mug with steam rising from it on a table beside her. She looked small and frail, huddled under a quilt that he had bought her. Her hair was a wave of grey. Laced up the side of her jaw and forehead was a pulsing network of wire. 

“What’s it do?” Bucky has asked once, on a particularly courageous day. 

“It keeps my mind from wandering,” she gave him a thin smile that could cut metal. 

Now she picked up her cup and without turning, gestured Bucky out to the balcony. He crossed the threshold, always a little taken aback by the cold, somehow worse so far from the ground. 

“Hello,” he offered. 

“Hello, Bucky,” she sipped her tea. “You’re late.” 

“I know,” he sat down in the chair oppisote her, vaguely aware of the Captain lingering in the room behind them. “It’s the cold.” 

“Yes, you always get grumbly this time of year,” she lifted the teapot, poured a second mug and handed it to him. “Bad turn?” 

He cradled it in his hands, imagining the heat seeping through his metal joints. 

“I talked to the Dealer.”

“Oh, him,” she snorted. “And what did he say that had you so rattled?” 

“I got a bot. Someone brought him to me. He’s real different. The Dealer says he’s trouble. That agents might come looking for him.” 

“How different?” Gone was any illusion of a fading grandmother. Here was the steel in her eyes, the barbed wire in her voice. 

“He’s here, you want to see him?” 

She gave a sharp nod. Captain stepped onto the balcony of his own accord. There was a wheeze of hydraulics, and then a soft noise that could’ve come from either of them. 

“Steve,” she held out her hand as if to touch, but paused. “It can’t be.” 

“I know you,” Captain said threadily, he met her hand, touching his fingertips lightly to hers. “I know that I know you. Your name...your name is Peggy.“

“Yes,” her eyes glistened. “That’s what some people called me once. Including you.” 

“But you didn’t call me Steve then. Is that my name?” 

“Yes,” she drew his hand into hers, so tight that her knuckles went white. “That’s your name.” 

“Why can’t I remember?” 

“After the procedure, we discovered your long term memory had been partially destroyed,” she said, voice on firmer ground with recited facts. “Dr. Erskine would never have done it if he knew that would happen. You retained skills and some facts. You recognize your mother’s photograph, but couldn’t recall who she had been to you. We were friendly beforehand, but after it was like we were strangers.” 

“What the hell kind of procedure was this?” Bucky demanded, then winced when both their gazes turned on him. He had interrupted something powerful and wasn’t sure if he should apologize. 

“They transferred my brain into an idealized replica of my body,” Captain glanced at Peggy as if to check and she nodded. “I was chosen. As a test to see if human minds in robot bodies would make betters soldiers.” 

“Steve wasn’t a well man. We needed a volunteer without a lot to lose. Which should’ve been the first sign that it was a bad idea,” MC looked away, over the skyline, “It all went wrong. Dr. Erskine was killed and with him any chance of correcting the mistakes that were made. Captain helped with the war efforts, but he’d sometimes get confused. Forget where we had planned to be. Get lost for days.” 

“Did I get lost at the end? Is that how I got to be in the water?” Captain asked, childlike in a way he hadn’t been before. 

“No, you were being very brave. Very noble,” she gave him a watery smile. “You almost saved us all. But the timing wasn’t right. The moment failed. Some of the bombs dropped. You went down with an airplane and we couldn’t find you. We looked, Captain, I promise we looked.” 

“Because we’re not things,” Bucky said quietly. “You found me looking for him, didn’t you?” 

“Yes,” she said simply, “but I’m very glad that I did. And that you two should find each other, here at the end of the world...I don’t know what to make of it.” 

“Me and him?” Bucky looked up at the bot. “I don’t understand.” 

For a long moment, she was silent. He could feel her weighing options. Making decisions. 

“Please,” Captain kneeled down at her feet. “I knew...I knew that I knew him. But I don’t know how.” 

“You were friends once. Nearly brothers,” she ran her hand over the Captain’s finger joints. Bucky recognized the gesture. She did it to his prosthetic sometimes. Checking for damage, for dirt. Just checking. Now he knew where it had come from. “After the procedure, you didn’t remember him. Or we thought you didn’t. But one of those times that you got lost, it was on the front and you came back with all of these POWs....” 

Bucky remembered dirt and blood. The taste of beans from a can. Useless details. 

“Did I remember you?” Captain looked to Bucky and Bucky ran a hand through his hair. 

“How should I know?” 

“He was recaptured, not long after,” MC went on, back to the dry recital. “The other side was attempting to replicate what we had done. They experimented. Poorly. Bucky was a hybrid solution as far as I could tell from the recovered notes. He remained partially organic, but his augmentations are some of the deepest and most complex I’ve seen before or since.” 

He folded his hands together. Pink and grey. She had told him all of that before. Let him read the notes. They wouldn’t stay in his head. Theoretically he knew other languages, but he could no longer make their letters stick together. He wondered sometimes if the memory wipe they used had crept too far in, a worm that burrowed ever inward. 

“I’m not a thing,” he reminded himself. 

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. Your nickname is Bucky,” she agreed. “You are, above all else, a person. You can make your own decisions.” 

“Even if they’re bad,” he finished the recestiation for her. 

“Sometimes especially then,” she nodded once sharply. “So that’s who you were. The question before us is: who will you be?” 

She insisted they go inside and eat. The red head appeared eventually, folding herself small into a chair. She watched them, eating sparingly. 

“Natasha,” MC said when the last bite was gone. “I think you should fetch Clint down. Let’s discuss this as a team.” 

“Are we a team?” The woman, who was sometimes Natasha, asked. 

“For today.” 

Clint was the hawk behind the steel hawk. Bucky had seen him there sometimes, crouched low behind his cover. He had a craggy smile and dark circles under his eyes. 

“I killed an agent on fourth today,” he announced before pleasantries. 

“You said they never came to the city,” Bucky growled, his heart already pounding too fast.His head hurt. 

“I said they wouldn’t come to you and I’ve kept my word,” MC said with serene steel. “I always will. But I can only keep a word as long as I have breath.” 

“Are you dying?” Captain asked, his hydraulics wheezing. 

“Not today,” she snorted. “But I’ve already lived far beyond the span of years given to me fairly. My time will come. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not for years.” 

“We’re not much of an org anymore,” Clint shrugged. “Nat and I will stay to the bitter end. But there’s more of them.” 

“Many more,” Natasha agreed. 

Bucky’s breath caught and held. Spots started dancing in front of his eyes. 

The song came back, the feel of metal warmed by fire cupping the back of his neck. Captain was hard to ignore, so steady and steadfast. Bucky breathed in and out. The spots faded. 

“This is my home,” he said, weak to his own ears. His shop. His quilts. His journals. All the small precious things between him and the great blackness. The ocean of blood. 

“Home is a tricky thing,” MC stood from the table, stretching out long thin limbs. “I’ve lived in this place for twice as long as any other place before. And I’ve never felt at ease here.” 

“Where did you?” Captain asked. 

“It was a long time ago and far away,” she rolled her shoulders back. “The past is another country, they say.” 

Another world. Another person’s life. 

“If here isn’t safe, where is?” he looked at all of them. “Where can’t they reach if they can find me buried away here?” 

“When it was just you, it wasn’t too bad. But if they get wind of him,” Clint gestured at Captain, “two of you together is worth the risk. They don’t care if they lose some drops of their tidal wave to us.” 

“So we separate?” Captain’s hand was still on Bucky’s neck. It should be awful. Instead, he felt grounded, moored for the time being to this moment. “I can go.” 

“You could,” Natasha agreed. “But what happens when you get caught up? Our network doesn’t extend beyond the city. And if you get in their hands, they’ll take you apart and put you back together. They’ll study you and turn you in their hands until you’re theirs.” 

“I can defend myself.” 

“So can a cornered rat, but that doesn’t mean the cat won’t win in the end,” Natasha said without emotion. 

“No one goes with them,” Bucky said firmly. “Not me. Not him. We don’t get taken.” 

Natasha nodded as if that was what she was waiting for. From her sleeve, she pulled a tiny chip. MC reached for it, and Natasha dropped it into her palm. 

“This contains the coordinates for a pickup point,” she curled her fingers around it. “It will take you some doing to get there. Once a year, there is a ship. It comes for a select group. I don’t know if they’ll take you. But it goes back to a country that no agent has ever found. A place none of us have ever detected.” 

“It’s a legend,” Natasha shrugged. “But there aren’t many alternatives.” 

“You want me to give up my home? The city? For some place that may not exist?” 

“It exists,” MC said firmly. “And it's all I have left to offer you both. I wish it was more.” 

“It’s okay, Peg,” Captain opened his arms and pulled her into a gentle hug. “It’s enough.” 

Bucky left the room. 

He couldn’t stand to hear her weep. 

Natasha followed after, at his back down the dark hall. 

“Please go.” And at first he thought she meant for him to leave the house, but she was standing in front of the door when he tried to exit. 

“I don’t understand.” 

“You won’t. Maybe ever,” she tipped her head to one side. “Please go to the coordinates. This is just a place. A sad dying place. And it would make me happy to know you weren’t in it.” 

“Why?” 

“Because,” she leaned up a kissed his cheek. “Go.” 

He didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to MC. He wasn’t sure what he would say anyway. Captain came down the hall, lifting his tongue to show the chip wedged there for safe keeping, then went out the front door. Bucky followed. 

Bucky did turn halfway down the street. The three of them were in their perches, sentitals in the dusk. He raised his arm, in an aborted wave. 

Three crisp salutes came back. 

It was harder to say goodbye to his nest. There was a battered duffle bag, used to haul parts. Captain snapped Bucky’s quilts into tight quarters, fitting them all inside. Bucky offered no protest to the use of their limited space. After all, Captain had no luggage. 

In another bag, he laid his journal with it’s cherished pen. A few changes of clothes, parts that were small, but useful for trade. 

“I don’t want to go,” he admitted, resting his hands on the broad table. He had scavenged the wood top himself, sanded it down on long summer nights in the back courtyard. 

“Maybe you can come back,” Captain offered. 

“Maybe.” 

He locked the door and pocketed the keys. As soon as they settled in his pocket, he knew they would never again slide home in a lock. 

They walked through the night. Within an hour they’d left behind the more densely occupied zones until the quiet heave of hydraulics and Bucky’s breathing the only sounds that cracked through abandoned streets. 

The bridge hung over the river, the once graceful arch rusted and swaying. The crossed the empty span, the water a rush of black beneath them. One limp sign pointed one way for New Jersey and another for points north. The Captain turned right and Bucky followed. 

The parkway was more park than road now. The pavement broken up by roots and grass. For the first time in years, Bucky saw wild animals bigger than his fist. A racoon stopped in its path, fearless, to watch them go by. 

“Doesn’t anyone live out there?” Captain asked. 

“Some, I guess. They come into the city sometimes. But I think they live far off the main roads. Or they’re in communes or something.” 

They passed an exit sign, the exit blocked off by rubble and half washed away graffiti warning people to keep moving. 

No one had been by to touch it up for some time. A mile down the road, there was a rusted tank covered in vines, it’s gun pointed to the sky. 

The sun rose slow, weakly shining through dense grey clouds. A chorus of birds started up, eating through the silence. Insects buzzed. Occasionally they’d hear something scurrying through the brush. 

“We used to do this,” Bucky could see the Captain out of the corner of his eye as they picked over a particularly broken patch of pavement. “During the war.” 

“Yes?” Captain paused. “Yes. That makes sense.” 

They had walked and walked, the complaints wearing away under thin soled boots. Even now their pace was in sync, feet hitting the ground simultaneously. 

Left. Right. Left Right. A rise and fall of voices measuring distance in rhyme. 

Everywhere we go  
People want to know  
Who we are....

The ghost of memory went translucent then crumbled away entirely. 

They stopped for Bucky to rest at midday. He sat on a flat stone and chewed through a protein brick. Captain stopped in a sunny spot a few feet away and turned his face up to light. It poured over him, shattering against metal skin and the stiff platinum of his constructed hair. 

Bucky ate and looked his fill. Maybe they had been something to each other once. Maybe they had been bound so close there was no room to breathe between them.

Maybe. Or maybe there was only now when they were torn loose from the past and cast into this ill begotten future, torn apart and reconstructed into patchwork people without anywhere to call home. Not even each other. 

They walked another few miles in the afternoon, the river staying to their right as they went. Invisible, but audible through the trees. 

“You should sleep,” Captain said tentatively when the moon traded places with the sun. 

“Out here?” 

It was too exposed. Too Not Home. 

But he was tired. He laid out his quilts on patch of grass. Captain sat down beside him. He lay awake a long time. Until slim metal fingers moved ever so slowly over his head and then slid into his hair. When Bucky didn’t rebuff him, Captain began to slowly stroke his hair. 

Despite himself, Bucky drifted to sleep. 

The next two days were a slow parting from the river. The broken jaw skyline of their city was eaten by distance until nothing of it remained. They glimpsed buildings weighted down by vines or shattered by fallen trees. Some had the charred edges of long ago fires. They startled deer several times, watching as entire herds took off running. 

Once, Bucky thought he spotted a coyote, but it was gone as soon as it was seen. 

They came across a divot in the road, filled with water that looked nearly clean. They stopped for Bucky to run in through filters and restock. 

“I hear something,” Captain moved slowly, almost like a ballet move, with his arm arching downward. 

Bucky got to his feet warily. 

A man emerged from the forest. He had no weapons, just a backpack. He was dirty, but not filthy. He had steel grey curls and a tired look. 

“We’re not looking for trouble,” Captain said carefully. 

The man stared at them, baffled. 

“I’m Bucky. This is C-” 

“Steve,” Captain corrected firmly. “We’re just passing through.” 

“To where?” The man asked. His voice was raspy and raw. 

“Fresh start,” Bucky eased his hand off the knife. “Far from here.” 

“Hard not to be. Everything is far from everywhere,” the man studied them. “I’m Bruce.” 

Bruce had a house that he wouldn’t show them. 

“Nothing personal,” he sat beside them in the grass. “Better for everyone involved this way.” 

He had bread that he would share. It tasted fresh. 

“Sorry there’s no butter.” 

“Haven’t had butter in a long time,” Bucky assured him. He didn’t say that he wasn’t entirely sure what butter was. 

“What are you doing this far out?” Captain stood guard over them even though it seemed to make Bruce restless.

“Everything is far away from anything these days,” Bruce shrugged. “You know, you look familiar.” 

“Do I?” Captain looked uninterested, a stark contrast from the laser focus he’d given Peggy’s memories. 

“Can’t be many like you still walking around. If there ever were,” Bruce looked down at his feet. 

“I know some people in the city,” Bucky offered. “If you need a place to go.” 

“No,” Bruce chuckled nervously. “I have all the place that I need.” 

Before they parted ways, Bruce gave Bucky a half a loaf of the good fresh bread. 

“Don’t save it,” Bruce told him as he offered it up, “Sometimes you just have to enjoy things while they’re good.” 

Bucky ate it as they walked away from the steel gray curls and deeply lined face. The forest grew quiet again. Late that night, they heard a distant roar. It seemed to shake the ground, low and deep and pained. But it didn’t reoccur. Bucky relaxed and slept. 

The overgrown highway signs grew further apart. Deer shivered into and out of their vision now. They were quick and wary of interlopers. Sometimes there was a distant howl of a wolf. The signs declared proximity to a Bear Mountain. Captain pointed to an exit where the road had been consumed by a stand of pines. 

“That one.” 

Nature ate away at their path. Bucky had to rely only on Captain’s assurances that the chip was guiding them. They didn’t talk much, but they walked closer together. With the mossy forest floor, there was no sound as Captain’s metal feet touched the ground. They were a silent unit, the press of hydraulics falling into rhythm with the huffs of Bucky’s breath. 

“What if no one’s there?” Bucky asked in the dark of another long night. He could just make out the semi-circle of the moon, it’s light dabbling through the branches. 

“We could live out here,” Captain said and his voice sounded far away though he was pressed close. “Like Bruce.” 

“It’d be hard to survive.”

“We’ve lived through everything else.” 

He couldn’t really imagine it. A hazy sketch of a house in stand of trees. How would he maintain Captain? What would he do all day? Become a hunter? A farmer? Who would teach him how? 

“I don’t want to just survive,” he told him, closing his eyes against the moon and the branches that raked over its face. 

The next day Bucky stepped on a landmine. 

In the orange gold sunrise, the trees had given way to a seemingly endless field of tall grass. It waved in the sun and proved harder to walk through even if the sightlines were better. It seemed like it might’ve been an actual farm until recently. The rows of grass (or was it wheat or corn?) still held in near rows, but they were overgrown and the only house they saw had a collapsed roof. 

It was as they neared the house that Bucky heard the tell tale _snick_ of a mine. A remnant of a war or a battle or just a defense from neighbors, but planted there and left armed all these years nonetheless. He stopped dead, barely daring to breathe. It took Steve only a moment to realize that he’d stopped. 

“What’s wrong?” The crystals of his eyes caught the light. It was beautiful. They were beautiful. If it was the last thing Bucky saw, then that was alright. 

“I stepped on a mine. If I lift my foot, it’s going to blow. Maybe. I guess it could be a dud after all this time.” 

Captain stood so still that Bucky could make out the faint vibration of his chassis, “What do you need me to do?” 

“Get as far away as you can.” 

“No.” 

They stood at an impasse. 

“Please,” he took a deep breath. “I can’t die knowing I took something good with me.” 

“And I won’t let you die.” 

It happened too fast. The full body tackle propelled them farther than it should’ve, but not quite far enough. Captain arched his body over Bucky’s body. He felt heat and the sound deafened him. The weight of Captain’s crafted flesh went heavy and limp on top of him. 

He dragged him away from where the blast had caught and started small fires. The smell of burnt hair lingered in his nose. 

He stopped over a mile away his right arm shaking from effort, the left socket from the tension of the augmentation. He kneeled beside Captain, trying to ascertain the damage. He knew bots, but now with the ragged tear in the casing of his torso it was apparent now more than ever that the Captain was no regular bot. Inside there were the usual pumps and levers, some still half heartedly chugging away, but there was also dense circuitry, thin tubing that seemed to carry fluids from place to place. When he angled his head just so, Bucky could make out the strangest thing of all. 

Encased in some kind of glass bubble was a human heart. Still beating. 

Bucky sat back on his haunches. It was possible that Captain was more alive than he was. Even if he was unconscious. There was no obvious damage to his head. 

There was nothing to be done about it. He had few tools with him. None enough to fix this kind of damage even if he was certain he knew how. Before the explosion, Captain had told him that they were close. Pointed in a direction. 

Bucky got to his feet. Something warm pooled down the side of his leg. But he had his own kind of programming, old and rotted. He leaned down and picked Captain up. No longer in the same frantic hurry, he found the best way to do it was over his shoulder, long metal limbs swaying as he walked. The Captain was heavy, but Bucky was strong. 

He felt a little light headed as he pushed on. The field gave way to trees again, harder to navigate, but by now it was familiar. Soon he could hear rushing water. His leg started to alert him that things were going wrong, but he ruthlessly pushed down the pain. 

They were supposed to be right on time. He would not be late. Not today. Not now. The thing that he had been always complete its mission. The thing never failed, never showed up a minute late. He could be a thing one last time. For himself. For Captain. 

The river rushed by once more. It went to the empty shore and scanned the horizon for an incoming boat. Nothing. 

The thing waited. The thing just needed orders and it could wait, standing with a heavy weight as long as it took. The thing had a mission and it always completed its missions. 

It did sway a little, dizziness pervading. At first it did not recognize the buzzing sound, thinking it came from inside. Then it looked up as the sound grew. 

A ship. A spaceship like from....a thousand years ago, a little boy sandwiched in beside him with a fragile paged brochure. Panels of vibrant color. Comics. Comics and milk and warmth shoved in together under a kitchen table. 

He wasn’t a thing. He was Bucky. The pain rushed in as the spaceship landed. Nausea rose in him, threatening to overspill. A ramp cascaded gently downward. 

Three women, each dressed in red and gold with dark eyes and serious expressions stepped out. They spoke in a language Bucky didn’t recognize. One lifted her wrist to her mouth and spoke to a ghost. 

“Please,” Bucky slid Captain out of his arms and gently into the rocky shore at their feet. “Take him.” 

“Just him?” One of them switched to English, her eyes raking over him. 

“I’ve had my chances. He hasn’t.” 

“They called you Winter Soldier once.” 

Bucky flinched. 

“Yes.” 

“What do they call you now?” 

“Bucky.” 

She turned back to the other women, who were apparently in disagreement with the ghost. Their words swirled around his head until he had to close his eyes against them. The ground rushed to meet him. He was tired. He had done what he could. He could rest now. 

A cool hand touched his forehead, “We’ll see what you have made of yourself, Mr. Bucky.” 

“Please...” he managed to gasp. And then the darkness ate him whole. 

When he next woke, it would be under a hot sun with a princess seated beside him. She would tell him many things about the place he would live out the rest of his life. Her name was Shuri which sounded to him like the water lapping at the shore. She gave him a bright smile. They would be friends to his infinite surprise. There was always a little space in her lab for him though he knew what he did was child’s play compared to her work. 

Shuri was important. She became his sun, sure to rise and set, spreading light and power as easily as laughter. And she fixed things. 

When he woke, she took his hands and helped him to his feet though she was very small and made him feel awkward and lumbering with her quick steps. She led him to the trees. 

Beneath the spread of leaves was an equally small man. He was pale and his hair was golden. When he turned his eyes were blue. They did not glitter in the sun. They were not studded with sapphires, but Bucky knew them nonetheless. 

“I couldn’t fix the body he was in,” Shuri said quietly. “But he agreed that this was an upgrade.” 

She walked away, leaving them there together. 

“How?” Bucky asked, choked. 

“It’s still mostly mechanical,” a hand with long fingers and real nails flexed. “But the skin feels real to the touch.” 

Bucky held out his hand, the one that still felt. The one that had last held the other’s hand. Long ago. Before the war. 

Their fingers intermingled as they hadn’t in years uncountable. They fell joined between them. Linked. 

“Hi, Steve.” 

“Hey, Bucky.” 

They brought Bucky the hard cases. The ones who had come back from the greater world with hurt in their eyes and scars on their bodies. They sat with him under his favorite fever tree, the one with roots dangling into the river. They talked to him and he listened. 

He couldn’t put them back together, but he could show them how he had stitched the wounds closed that they shared. He tried hard to give them what remained of his kindness. 

He had no shop. There was no dusty building. Instead there was a small house outside the city limits with a view of the water. There was a bed, but it was too hot for all except one quilt. The others hung on the walls, like flags of lost countries. 

And in the bed, there were usually two. They didn’t need much sleep. Bucky still didn’t dream. But he did curl tight around his Captain and the ghostly slivers of memory faded into abstraction where they could bother him no more. There was only this iteration and this heaven, bathed in sunlight. 

_Janu 15. Day 1049._

_Operating at 98%. Slept in. Ship spotted in orbit today, unknown origin. Disappeared quick as it came in. Guess they didn’t see a point in visiting a ruined rock. To do: go to lake district for cheese, make kite for M’tabu, visit Shuri wrt creaking in elbow joint and gossip. End Day 1049._


End file.
